Arctic Monkeys Invent Wild Rumors to Promote New Album

When a video surfaced a few months ago showing Arctic Monkey's drummer Matt Helders hanging in Miami with Diddy, the Internet was set ablaze around P's comment that he'd love to sign the British band to his own Bad Boy Entertainment label. For the bio that the band sent to journalists in preparations to talk for their forthcoming third LP 'Humbug,' they expanded on the idea that Dids and Helders would enter into a "wildly experimental, cross-Atlantic hip-hop label" entitled Good Boy Entertainment.

"That's one of the things that's not true. Even on the press release," Helders tells Spinner. "We got our friend to write it but we didn't give him any information. They're half truths. Predictions." Thus, sadly, no cross-Atlantic ventures anytime soon. But if so, what would Helders like to direct the focus on? "I'd just do some reissues. And box sets."

Other tall tales that might make it to an Internet near you soon: bassist Nick O'Malley has been entangled in a legal dispute over coining the word 'chillax' and an unhealthy obsession with zippers, guitarist Jamie Cook took some time off to do some world traveling, during which he discovered a new type of spice within tree bark and two new species of anteaters in Bolivia and lead singer Alex Turner has purchased 11 "derelict" tube stations in London, giving him control of "nearly a third of London's underground landscape."

Journalists have been busy asking a lot of specific questions about these recent "events," to which the Monkey men haven't necessarily been denying. "They asked me about [Turner's tube purchases] on the phone, and I said 'Yeah, he's really into it,'" Helders says.

Still, that anteater thing sounds cool. 'Humbug' is due August 25.